The Void

So I finally got around to reading the McGowan piece you recommended, and like you I got a lot out of it. I think my thoughts over the past 6 months have circulated around a very simple binary to do with politics and art centering on the relationship between autonomy and engagement. I really like it when writers apply theory to really simple, pop cultural examples because it helps me understand them in very simple terms, which is probably why Zizek is so popular.

So, the concept of the void, or missing signifier or the absent female binary didn’t make terribly much sense to me in the way McGowan and Roger spoke of it until he applied it in his reading of the DaVinci Code showing how the missing signifier of the female in Western culture proposed in the suppressed figure of Mary Magdalen in Christianty refers to two approaches to dealing with the void, one is to repress it and deny the existence of a void at the center of culture, thus creating a totalizing master signifier or trying to restore or fill the void and thereby suggesting that the fundamental lack is something that can be filled the result of which will be a restoration of a perfect order of things and again denying the limits of symbolic representation.

I wasn’t entirely sure of his assessment of the agonistic politics and radical democracy of Laclau and Mouffe. Presumably, their argument that the heart of politics and democracy is a constant agonistic push and pull between left and right, in that sense preserving the void by suggesting the gulf between the two poles cannot be overcome and that, contrary to a radical Marxist politics, in a radical democracy the goal is simply to exist to be antagonistic against the Right rather than to become a dominant, totalizing system in itself (which presumably would lead to a dictatorship of the proletariat a la Leninist-Marxism). Yet McGowan’s reading of them is negative, though I kind of see agonistic politics as an acknowledgement of the productive possibilities of the void in politics.

In relation to autonomy versus engagement vis a vis politics in art, McGowan’s argument is useful for me in not conceiving of the tension as a problem to be overcome. In other words, I was consumed with the question of whether its better to sit in a studio divorced from reality and produce autonomous utopias as alternatives to the real world, or to go out and apply aesthetic practice to the world as a form of direct political action. In these terms, conceiving of autonomy and engagement figuratively as two opposing poles, with a tight rope stretched across the void which one traverses every so carefully back and forth as the spectacle itself. The balancing act between autonomy and engagement is the dialectical productive potential of the void in art. One must pull the rope tight between these poles to produce enough tension which allows one to be productive and it is not ones purpose to bring those poles together. So this all also relates back to that old Gillick chestnut of looking at the gaps in culture, which now reconceived as the void, can be interpreted as looking at the ways in which the void is variously repressed or filled in culture to create false totality. When artists look at and become attracted by these points, they are interested in showing how these are the voids in culture which the culture itself attempts to ‘paper over’ because they point directly to how the entire system functions at, which is as a construct. Again, I guess it totally comes down to the void being the idea that everything is constructed, but looking at it from the point of view of artists, we are attracted to the void not only because it pulls away the shroud to reveal how everything is false, but because the void is the space around which we begin to build symbolic systems (which is all art is), in other words become creative and construct reality in the productive, positive sense of the word. I’ll rewatch Roger’s talk and write some more and revise my opinions no doubt, but this is what I’ve got out of it so far.